• Home
• Site Map
• Foreword
  • Foreword
  • Contributors & Copyright
• Introduction
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Sites
    • Why Pando and East Kalimantan?
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Bolivia
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Indonesia
• Part I. Concepts
  • Wellbeing and Poverty
    • Poverty is More Than Low Income
    • Poverty is a Lack of Wellbeing
    • Poverty and Wellbeing Have Many Dimensions
    • Further Reading
  • Local Governments and Poverty
    • How can Local Governments Reduce Poverty?
    • Four Steps to Improve Local Governmental Action
    • Further Reading
  • Forests and Poverty
    • How do Forests Influence Poverty?
    • What is Poverty in Forest Communities?
    • Are Forests Safety Nets, Poverty Traps or Escape Routes?
    • Further Reading
• Part II. Tools
  • Monitoring
    • What is monitoring?
    • Types of Monitoring
    • Indicators
    • When to monitor?
    • Who conducts monitoring?
    • Linking monitoring to planning
  • Participatory Planning
    • What is participatory planning?
    • Why is participatory planning useful?
    • When and where is participatory planning done?
    • Who should participate?
  • Tool 1: Interactive Mapping
    • What is interactive mapping?
    • Interactive mapping step-by-step
    • Use interactive mapping for monitoring
  • Tool 2: Wellbeing Monitoring
    • What is a local wellbeing monitoring system?
    • Wellbeing monitoring step-by-step
    • Step 1: Define purpose, develop plan and budget
    • Step 2: Develop local poverty indicators and formulate survey questions
    • Step 3: Design the sampling strategy
    • Step 4: Train staff and perform the survey
    • Step 5: Analyse and present the data
    • Step 6: Present findings
  • Tool 3: Community Evaluation
    • Evaluating local government programmes through community focus groups
    • Steps 1-3
    • Steps 4-6
    • Steps 7-8
    • Community evaluation step-by-step
  • Tool 4: Scenario-based Planning
    • What is scenario-based planning?
    • Scenario-based planning step-by-step
    • Visioning
    • Pathways
• Final Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• Additional Resources
• PDF Version

Monitoring is the systematic gathering and analysis of information in order to gauge if something is changing. Monitoring is a key function of government and an essential part of the learning process for local governments that have been charged with new responsibilities and resources under decentralisation. With the information provided by monitoring, local governments can analyse whether their programmes are working and determine how to improve them. They can learn from both successes and failures.

Monitoring can help local governments understand if new government processes are participatory. For instance, monitoring can answer questions such as:

• Are community leaders giving all constituents a chance to be consulted before proposing projects?
• Is community participation in annual budget meetings improving? Who is participating?

Monitoring can also help government officials understand the conditions faced by local people. By monitoring the impact of its programmes and services, local government can understand whether programmes are helping people and identify opportunities for improvement. This information is invaluable for prioritising and planning activities. For instance, monitoring can help local governments answer questions such as:

• Is electricity available more hours per day and per household than before?
• Has transportation to communities improved? Has the average travel time to communities decreased?
• Is the incidence of malaria in the municipality increasing or decreasing? Is the malaria eradication programme having an effect?

Currently, monitoring, if it is conducted at all, is often an afterthought or is simply done to fulfil reporting requirements. As a result, monitoring is usually poorly tied to decision making processes. Local governments have many demands on their time and resources, and often do not prioritise monitoring. Sometimes they erroneously believe that monitoring is the same as auditing and regard it with misgiving.

However, monitoring is important for local government for several reasons.

1. Monitoring helps local government track what it is doing. Local government can track processes that are necessary for it to function, such as when meetings are held, who attends the meetings, or how government projects have been implemented. This is called process monitoring.
2. Monitoring provides a way of tracking conditions over time. Are things getting better, worse, or staying the same? This type of monitoring attempts to describe the situation on the ground by repeatedly measuring selected indicators to observe change. Is household wellbeing improving? Is the quality of drinking water getting worse? Monitoring parameters like these over time allows local governments to better understand the nature of poverty and wellbeing.
   
3. Comparing the above results can determine the relationship between actions and impacts. Systematically gathering information on the implementation of programmes, as well as on changes in the affected area, allows a local government to identify whether it is having an impact and evaluate whether the impact is worth the effort. For example, a local government that has been funding a pilot school breakfast programme wants to expand the programme and is seeking counterpart funding. However, it can only demonstrate that the programme has been successful if it shows that the school breakfast programme was implemented, that it reached the intended participants and that the targeted children were better fed. This linkage between action and results would indicate if there has been success or not. This is called impact monitoring.
4. Monitoring helps governments plan better. It provides information to answer questions that can help local government prioritise and target activities (where, who, what problems, etc.).
5. Information resulting from monitoring also helps local government document and demonstrate its actions or needs. Providing the information to constituents is crucial for justifying programmes, but also for allowing constituents to evaluate progress. This information may be required in procuring partnership funding for future development investments.

© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Contributors and copyright information